Equisense Motion: an initial impression

When the Kickstarter for the Equisense Balios (later renamed Motion?) floated across my facebook, I hemmed for about ten seconds before backing it.

Annnddd promptly forgot about it, so when a year later I received a shipping notice, I felt like a child I was so excited. I had a physical reaction to it. SO excited.

It arrives in this super cute little box with the attachment in it's own box, and a bunch of little details were well-thought out and made the whole process easy. For example, you can take the girth attachment apart, and all the pieces are imprinted with either an 'R' or an 'L' so you can put it back together by matching the right hand pieces together. There's also a charger with more adapters for different countries than I've ever seen in one spot.

It was raining when I got it, so even though I intended to jet right over to the barn to try it out I decided to wait a day for dryer weather so I didn't soak the thing right off the bat. It's supposedly water resistant, but I didn't want to kill it before I had time to play.

So I did the only logical thing a girl could do.

:D

I ran about the house for approximately one minute with the dog chasing me.

The next day, I put it to the test on Elrond.

Stoked for cookies, not for work. 

It was pretty hard to spot once it was on the horse, super discreet. The sensor itself slides into that orange compartment and it's a little tricky to pull back out again to charge, but I think it's a practice thing combined with my deep fear of destroying the sensor.

In my crushing enthusiasm, I somehow neglected to charge it fully before riding with it, so what is screenshotted below shows you the first ten minutes of his workout. I will write another post after I've put a few more rides on horses with it, maybe a week or so in order to compare with the different horses.

What you're seeing is about five minutes walking to the left, a bit of trotting to the left, a spook, and some trotting to the right before it died. I promise I'm not that uneven usually!

Here are some things I'm really excited about:

1) I can automatically share the data with other people, so when I have a client who puts a horse in full training, if I get in the habit of using this properly, it would probably provide some peace of mind to see that the horse is, in fact, getting out.

2) If the 'symmetry' functions as it's supposed to, it will alert me if a horse becomes more asymmetrical than usual, thus helping to identify minor lameness before it becomes immediately evident to the eye. I like that.

3) I'm looking forward to having this to track how hard my workouts have been over the weeks and months, as well as being able to keep an eye on time spent on each rein. (Which, especially when I have horses with bugs about certain things, I do not pay attention to. I will trot lef through this corner until you stop being frightened of it.)

I'm not sure if the company plans on developing a heart rate monitor to work alongside their current device, but I think that would just about cap all - if within the same application as the Motion I could also see heartrate info.  I did also back Seaver, which claims it WILL have that information already taken in its device, so it'll be super fun in a few months when it comes out to compare the devices.

I backed it pretty early, so I paid €161. I believe the market price will be about double that, and at this point, I haven't used it enough to know whether I'd endorse it for that full price. It's currently still in Beta, which was pretty evident when I went to update it and the whole thing crashed, then informed me my Motion wouldn't work because I'd closed the application before it had finished, then it all worked fine without any further work. 

What are some ways you could find a tool like this useful?